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Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Act III, scene iii

Act IV, scenes i–ii

Summary

In Gertrude’s chamber, the queen and Polonius wait for
Hamlet’s arrival. Polonius plans to hide in order to eavesdrop on
Gertrude’s confrontation with her son, in the hope that doing so
will enable him to determine the cause of Hamlet’s bizarre and threatening behavior.
Polonius urges the queen to be harsh with Hamlet when he arrives,
saying that she should chastise him for his recent behavior. Gertrude
agrees, and Polonius hides behind an arras, or tapestry.

Hamlet storms into the room and asks his mother why she
has sent for him. She says that he has offended his father, meaning
his stepfather, Claudius. He interrupts her and says that she has offended
his father, meaning the dead King Hamlet, by marrying Claudius.
Hamlet accosts her with an almost violent intensity and declares
his intention to make her fully aware of the profundity of her sin.
Fearing for her life, Gertrude cries out. From behind the arras,
Polonius calls out for help. Hamlet, realizing that someone is behind
the arras and suspecting that it might be Claudius, cries, “How
now! a rat?” (III.iv.22). He draws his sword
and stabs it through the tapestry, killing the unseen Polonius.
Gertrude asks what Hamlet has done, and he replies, “Nay, I know
not: / Is it the king?” (III.iv.24). The
queen says his action was a “rash and bloody” deed, and Hamlet replies
that it was almost as rash and bloody as murdering a king and marrying
his brother (III.iv.26–28). Disbelieving,
the queen exclaims, “As kill a king!” and Hamlet replies that she
heard him correctly (III.iv.29).

Hamlet lifts the arras and discovers Polonius’s body:
he has not killed the king and achieved his revenge but has murdered
the relatively innocent Polonius. He bids the old man farewell,
calling him an “intruding fool” (III.iv.30).
He turns to his mother, declaring that he will wring her heart.
He shows her a picture of the dead king and a picture of the current
king, bitterly comments on the superiority of his father to his
uncle, and asks her furiously what has driven her to marry a rotten
man such as Claudius. She pleads with him to stop, saying that he
has turned her eyes onto her soul and that she does not like what
she sees there. Hamlet continues to denounce her and rail against
Claudius, until, suddenly, the ghost of his father again appears
before him.

Hamlet speaks to the apparition, but Gertrude is unable
to see it and believes him to be mad. The ghost intones that it
has come to remind Hamlet of his purpose, that Hamlet has not yet
killed Claudius and must achieve his revenge. Noting that Gertrude
is amazed and unable to see him, the ghost asks Hamlet to intercede
with her. Hamlet describes the ghost, but Gertrude sees nothing,
and in a moment the ghost disappears. Hamlet tries desperately to
convince Gertrude that he is not mad but has merely feigned madness
all along, and he urges her to forsake Claudius and regain her good conscience.
He urges her as well not to reveal to Claudius that his madness
has been an act. Gertrude, still shaken from Hamlet’s furious condemnation
of her, agrees to keep his secret. He bids her goodnight, but, before
he leaves, he points to Polonius’s corpse and declares that heaven
has “punished me with this, and this with me” (III.iv.158).
Hamlet reminds his mother that he must sail to England with Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, whom he says he will regard with suspicion, as
though they were poisonous snakes, since he assumes that their loyalties
are with Claudius, not with him. Dragging Polonius’s body behind
him, Hamlet leaves his mother’s room.

Analysis

What is Hamlet trying to do in his confrontation with
his mother? It is possible that he wants her to confirm her knowledge
of Claudius’s crime, to provide further proof of his guilt. Or it
may be that Hamlet wants to know whether she was complicit in the
crime. Or he may feel that he needs her on his side if he is to
achieve justice. While all of these are possibilities, what Hamlet
actually does is urge his mother to repent choosing Claudius over
his own father. More specifically, he repeatedly demands that she
avoid Claudius’s bed. Actually, he’s much more specific: he tells
her not to let Claudius arouse her by fondling her neck, not to
stay within his semen-infested sheets, and other shockingly graphic
details.

This is another point in the play where audiences and
readers have felt that there is more going on in Hamlet’s brain
than we can quite put our fingers on. Sigmund Freud wrote that Hamlet
harbors an unconscious desire to sexually enjoy his mother. Freud
maintained that all men unconsciously desire their mothers in this
way, and he called this the “Oedipus Complex,” after the character
in Sophocles’ play who unwittingly murders his father and has several children
by his own mother. Whether or not Freud was right about this is
as difficult to prove as any of the problems that Hamlet worries
about, but his argument in regard to Hamlet is quite remarkable.
He says that while Oedipus actually enacts this fantasy, Hamlet
only betrays the unconscious desire to do so. Hamlet is thus a quintessentially
modern person, because he has repressed desires.

Though Gertrude’s speech in this scene is largely limited
to brief reactions to Hamlet’s lengthy denunciations of her, it
is our most revealing look at her character. As the scene progresses,
Gertrude goes through several states of feeling: she is haughty
and accusatory at the beginning, then afraid that Hamlet will hurt
her, shocked and upset when Hamlet kills Polonius, overwhelmed by
fear and panic as Hamlet accosts her, and disbelieving when Hamlet
sees the ghost. Finally, she is contrite toward her son and apparently
willing to take his part and help him. For Gertrude, then, the scene
progresses as a sequence of great shocks, each of which weakens
her resistance to Hamlet’s condemnation of her behavior. Of course,
Gertrude is convinced mainly by Hamlet’s insistence and power of
feeling, illustrating what many readers have felt to be her central
characteristic: her tendency to be dominated by powerful men and
her need for men to show her what to think and how to feel.

This quality explains why Gertrude would have turned to
Claudius so soon after her husband’s death, and it also explains
why she so quickly adopts Hamlet’s point of view in this scene.
Of course, the play does not specifically explain Gertrude’s behavior.
It is possible that she was complicit with Claudius in the murder
of her husband, though that seems unlikely given her surprised reaction
to Hamlet’s accusation in this scene, and it is possible that she
merely pretends to take Hamlet’s side to placate him, which would
explain why she immediately reports his behavior to Claudius after
promising not to do so. But another interpretation of Gertrude’s
character seems to be that she has a powerful instinct for self-preservation
and advancement that leads her to rely too deeply on men. Not only
does this interpretation explain her behavior throughout much of
the play, it also links her thematically to Ophelia, the play’s
other important female character, who is also submissive and utterly dependent
on men.

Hamlet’s rash, murderous action in stabbing Polonius is
an important illustration of his inability to coordinate his thoughts
and actions, which might be considered his tragic flaw. In his passive, thoughtful
mode, Hamlet is too beset by moral considerations and uncertainties
to avenge his father’s death by killing Claudius, even when the
opportunity is before him. But when he does choose to act, he does
so blindly, stabbing his anonymous “enemy” through a curtain. It
is as if Hamlet is so distrustful of the possibility of acting rationally
that he believes his revenge is more likely to come about as an
accident than as a premeditated act.

When he sees Polonius’s corpse, Hamlet interprets his
misdeed within the terms of retribution, punishment, and vengeance: “Heaven
hath pleased it so / To punish me with this, and this with me” (III.iv.157–158).
Though Hamlet has not achieved his vengeance upon Claudius, he believes
that God has used him as a tool of vengeance to punish Polonius’s
sins and punish Hamlet’s sins by staining his soul with the murder.

A rationalist, by definition, is logical. And if he--not his friend, not his mother, not his pastor--sees a ghost, he will acknowledge as such. That's why Horatio freely admitted upon seeing the evidence. So I'm not sure what "blind rationalist" means.

Revenge, ambition, lust and conspiracy return to the heads of those that conjured them in Hamlet, completely annihilating two families--the innocent with the guilty. Check out my blog on the play (includes current link to PBS Great Performance video of production of play):